Publication of the Encyclopédie (1751–1772)
The Encyclopédie began publication in 1751, took twenty-one years, and ran to twenty-eight volumes. It started as a commission to translate an English reference work and became something else when Diderot and d'Alembert took it over: 72,000 articles, 2,500 plates, some 140 contributors, and a preliminary discourse mapping all human knowledge as a product of memory, reason and imagination rather than of revelation. The plates are the part that startles. Volume after volume of engravings of trades — the making of pins, the casting of type, the tanning of hides, the working of coal — described with a seriousness previously reserved for theology, on the argument that the mechanical arts are knowledge and that the men who practise them know things. The subversion was structural rather than declared. Articles on orthodox subjects were unexceptionable and carried cross-references to articles that undermined them, so that a reader following the trail from a piece on the Eucharist arrived at one on cannibalism. It was suppressed by the council of state in 1752 and again in 1759, and continued under the tacit protection of the director of publishing, Malesherbes, who at one point hid the manuscripts in his own house. Its publisher, Le Breton, secretly censored the last ten volumes after Diderot had passed them and was found out years later. Some 4,000 sets were sold, at a price equal to a skilled worker's annual income, and it went into cheaper editions and pirated ones across Europe. D'Alembert left in 1759. Diderot's own summary of the object was to change the common way of thinking, which he put in a private letter rather than the prospectus. The word he used for the enterprise was the one that later attached to the whole century.
- Year: 1751 CE
- Category: Cultural
